The SMDM is an international society promoting the theory and practice of medical decision making through the application of analytic methods. The Society is devoted to the analysis of decision making as it applies to clinical practice, to the establishment of health care policies, and to the administration of health care programs. It addresses a diversified audience of health care professionals including physicians and other health workers. As such, its basic goals mesh well with the overall aims of the AHCPR to educate allied health professionals and disseminate information relevant to health policy research. Specific objectives of the 1990 meeting include: 1) Providing a forum for discussing applications of health outcomes research in medical decision making. This will be accomplished through the aforementioned symposium discussing the emerging importance of health outcomes research, its relation to activities of the society, and likely future directions, particularly as they relate to the decision sciences. 2) To communicate to the membership the importance of this field. 3) To educate health care professionals through a series of courses about outcomes research, cost- effectiveness analysis, meta-analysis, and basic, practical applications of decision making. 4) To disseminate this information through the publication of a proceedings of the meeting including the symposium, in order to reach both SMDM members not attending the meeting as well as interested colleagues in related research communities. 5) To increase awareness in the health-care community at large, both in academia and industry, of the field of health outcomes research and the contributions of SMDM and the decision sciences to that effort.